China has blamed America's cripplingly expensive military campaigns for the
current debt crisis and called for the world's leading superpower to rethink
its global "domineering".

"Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States, as the world's sole superpower, has relied on its powerful military to meddle everywhere in international affairs, advancing hegemony, and paying no heed to whether the economy can support this," said an editorial on the official Xinhua news wire, China's second fierce attack on the US in three days.

"Now is the right time for the United States, trapped in economic hardship, to reflect on its domineering thinking and deeds," it added.

Meanwhile, a commentary in the People's Daily newspaper, the mouthpiece of the Communist party, said that the global economy would suffer if "the US, Europe and other advanced economies fail to shoulder their responsibility and continue their incessant messing around over selfish interests".

China has sharpened its rhetoric on the debt crisis as it watches its own market plunge on fears that the global economy is set for a double-dip. Today the Shanghai Composite Index fell 3.79pc, its biggest daily fall since last November, to 2,526.82 points.

China's leaders have found themselves backed into a corner, having to keep their monetary policy tight with inflation running at 6.7pc on the consumer price index, but fearful of the effect of the crisis on exports, a main pillar of economic growth.

"The top two Chinese export markets [the US and Europe] are in trouble at the same time now. The prospects look even worse than the global financial crisis," said Wilson Shea Kai-chuen, a spokesman for Hong Kong-owned businesses in the region, to the South China Morning Post.

With European debt now also unpalatable, Beijing also finds itself increasingly unable to diversify its huge holdings of dollars, built up in order to hold down the value of the yuan. Analysts in China suggested the blustery editorials against the US were partly designed to deflect blame for the negative consequences of China's foreign exchange policy.

China currently holds around $1.4tn (£850bn) of US Treasuries, which make up about 60pc to 65pc of its foreign exchange reserves. And far from decoupling from its dependence on the US market, China's trade surplus with the US hit a record $273bn last year.

In response, Timothy Geithner, the US Treasury secretary said he was not concerned that last week's downgrade of US debt would stop China from buying treasuries. "They have been very strong and I'm sure they will be strong investors in the US going forward," he said in an interview with NBC television. "I'm very confident in that."

On Sunday, China balanced its more strident editorials with a sober article by Sun Lijian, a respected economist.

"The lowering of the United States' long-term sovereign credit rating has sounded a warning bell for the international currency system dominated by the US dollar," Mr. Sun wrote in the People's Daily. "Yet the biggest victims may not be the United States itself, but other countries that have depended on external demand to amass national wealth."

Other economists, including Xia Bin, an academic adviser to the central bank, suggested that the US economy was now in a weakening cycle and that China needed to reform its exchange rate more quickly to diversify away from holding "overly" large quantities of dollars. Yesterday, the central bank made a promising start by raising its daily fixing for the yuan against the dollar by the most in nearly a year and letting the exchange rate climb to a record high.